One of the unique services Gallery 19 provides is House Portraiture. These are not only popular with ex-patriates who want a memory of their London home when they move-on or return to their native countries but with local residents who love their homes and the areas they live in. House Portraits also make highly original and personal gifts as clients are involved in every step  of the process, from concept to creation.

Gordon French has been painting London houses for over twenty-five years and is always developing new ways of portraying the house you live in. Executed on paper or canvas in Indian ink and acrylic, Gordon can paint your house or the street you live in. Gordon can also paint your house on antique indenture or, if your house has an interesting history, incorporate your house into an appropriate collage. Gordon's newest type of house portrait involves the house being painted on a thick tracing paper and pinned to a map of the area, another pin marking the exact address [see image above]. House portraits usually taken about a month to complete and prices start from £450 [unframed].

For more about Gordon French check out this months Patron Profile by John Gau on the Kensington Court Resident Association website www.kensingtoncourtresidents.org

The public has been fascinated with Kensington Palace and its glamorous residents since the arrival of Princess Margaret in the sixties, Princess Michael of Kent in the seventies and Diana, Princess of Wales in the eighties. Indeed Kensington Palace became the symbol of a nation’s grief over the death of Diana when newspapers around the world published photographs of the pathway leading up to the south face of the palace clogged with flowers from mourners. Now with the official re-opening on Monday 26^th March, after a two year £12 million refurbishment, and the arrival of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge [and Prince Harry!] public interest in KP has been ignited again. What better time to remember the history of Kensington Palace and its eccentric royal residents as well as featuring Gallery 19s stock of original paintings, prints and engravings featuring the jewel in Kensington’s crown.

In 1689 William and Mary bought Nottingham House – a modest Jacobean villa built by Sir George Coppin in 1610 – off Daniel Finch, Second Earl of Nottingham, for the grand sum of 18,000 guineas. The King suffered from the fogs and floods of the Thames in his Whitehall Palace and thought the country air would benefit his asthma. Nottingham House was to be William and Mary’s winter residence but the palace was too small for the royal court and Sir Christopher Wren was immediately commissioned to enlarge and develop the site. Both William and Mary died at Kensington Palace – Mary of smallpox in 1694 and William, catching a chill after breaking his collarbone on his horse at Hampton Court, in 1702. 

William’s successor Queen Anne – a lonely and unhappy woman – also put her stamp on Kensington Palace, especially the gardens. She commissioned Nicholas Hawksmoor and Sir John Vanbrugh to build the Orangery [1704-5] and Henry Wise laid out a magnificent baroque parterre, a 30 acre formal garden with planting beds and gravel paths arranged in an attractive symmetrical pattern on the level surface. Extensions begun by William and Mary – such as the Queens Apartments, Wren’s shallow staircase and the Queens Entrance – were completed.

George I was an appalling monarch who cared little for the palace or its gardens yet the carnal necessity to house his mistress, the Duchess of Kendal, in the palace – while his wife was imprisoned in a remote German castle on trumped-up legal charges – prompted George to have a stylish apartment built on the north-west side of the palace [which Charles and Diana, Prince and Princess of Wales later occupied]. William Kent was employed to paint staircases and ceilings and in 1720 Kent built the Cupola Room. Aside from the enlargements to Kensington Palace George I, or German George, left the running of the country to Sir Horace Walpole while he entertained himself with his plump Hanoverian mistresses, Jory the Dwarf and Peter the Wild Boy, a feral child found in the woods near Hanover and allowed to roam around Kensington Gardens.

George II – a more popular monarch than his father – left Kensington Palace to be ruled by his wife, Queen Caroline. Caroline was a great patron of the arts, commissioning paintings by Hogarth and Kneller and discovering lost sketches by Holbein and Da Vinci in the royal collection. Charles Bridgeman oversaw the work on the Serpentine, the Round Pond and the Broad Walk and his landscaping of Kensington Gardens – under Queen Caroline – remains almost entirely unchanged today.

In 1761 George III, grandson and successor of George II, bought Buckingham House [now Buckingham Palace] as his family residence while his other residences included Kew and Windsor Castle and St James’s Palace for official occasions. Kensington Palace became somewhat unfashionable after the decampment of the reigning monarch and gained a reputation for housing minor – somewhat colourful – royals. Augustus Frederick, George III’s strange sixth son and later Duke of Sussex, walked around the palace in a skullcap and silk dressing grown singing to the finches that were free to fly around his apartments. He was a great supporter of Caroline, Princess of Wales, whose disastrous marriage to the Prince of Wales was the talk of London society. Darling Prinnie abandoned Caroline in Kensington Palace soon after their daughter Princess Charlotte was born. Caroline was an unconventional royal, notorious for walking hatless and sitting down on public benches to talk to strangers. She was refused entrance to her husband’s coronation but it was the death of her daughter, Princess Charlotte, that broke her heart. Caroline was a tragic and unhappy figure and one of the three ghosts that haunt Kensington Palace [the others are George II and Princess Sophia, George III’s near-blind daughter].

On 24 May 1819 Princess Alexandrina Victoria was born in Kensington Palace. She was the daughter of the penniless Edward, Duke of Kent, who died nine months after her birth. For the first ten years of her life, Victoria enjoyed the company of her half-sister Feodora as well as her governess Louise Lehzen who played with Victoria’s 132 dolls and remained a close confidant until Victoria’s own marriage. The young Victoria lived an isolated life at Kensington Palace. Sir John Conway, her mother’s chamberlain and confidant devised the Kensington System, a series of regulations that prevented Victoria from meeting new people and kept her reliant on him-self and the Duchess of Kent [she still managed to meet her cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg, whom she married in 1840]. In 1837 William IV died and – having no legitimate heir – the throne went to his niece Victoria who recorded the momentous occasion in her diary: 

I was awoke a 6 o’ clock by Mamma who told me that the Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Conyngham were here and wished to see me. I got out of bed and went into my sitting room (only in my dressing gown) and alone, and saw them. Lord Conyngham then acquainted me that my poor uncle, the King, was no more…and consequently that I am Queen

Although Victoria moved to Buckingham Palace when she became queen she granted rooms in Kensington Palace to her family and retired retainers. In 1867 Princess Mary of Teck [Princess May] was born to the Queens cousin, Princess Mary Adelaide of Cambridge. The spendthrift nature and lavish hospitality of the Tecks resulted in a mountain of debts with local traders. In 1873 Princess Louise [Victoria’s sculptress daughter] was given the rooms formerly occupied by the Duchess of Inverness, widow of the Duke of Sussex. Princess Louise had a studio in Kensington Palace from which the statue of Queen Victoria in Kensington Gardens emerged. Princess Louise made one dramatic change to her apartments when she ordered the windows bricked up after discovering her husband, Lord Lorne, was climbing through them to visit his mistress at night. 

Just before the turn of the century Kensington Palace received a £23,000 grant for some much needed restoration before the State Rooms were opened to the public. The palace had been allowed to decay; some of the State Rooms were used as barracks while the Kings Gallery had metamorphosed into a coal store and boot room. The restored Kensington Palace was officially opened on 24 May 1899, Queen Victoria’s birthday, with the queen being carried through the house she was born in in a bath chair. 

Princess May, or Princess Mary of Teck, became the Queen consort to King George V and moved to Buckingham Palace but her interest in the KP never diminished and was transferred to her husband:

King George’s dream…is to pull down Buckingham Palace, to round of St James and the Green Park at Constitution Hill and Buckingham Gate and with the money obtained by the sale of the gardens of Buckingham Palace to reconstruct Kensington Palace as the town residence of the Sovereign

The above never eventuated but landscaping continued and in 1911 more State Apartments were opened to the public as Kensington Palace housed the London Museum. The Western wing of the palace retained its royal inhabitants – Princess Beatrice [Victoria’s youngest daughter] moved next door to her sister Princess Louise, the Duchess of Albany moved into the haunted Clock House and Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone lived in Kensington Palace until her death in 1981. During the First World War George V allowed a number of rooms in KP to be used by those working for Irish POWs and Irish soldiers at the front and decreed that its royal inhabitants adhere to the same rations as everyone else. 

During the 1920s and 1930s Kensington Palace was nicknamed “the aunt heap” by Edward VIII due to the number of spinster relatives in residence. It wasn’t until the arrival of Philip Mountbatten who, in exile from Greece and staying with his grandmother the Dowager Marchioness of Milford Haven, injected some much needed liveliness into the matronly rhythm of life at Kensington Palace. Philip also stayed at Kensington Palace during the lead-up to his marriage to Princess Elizabeth, later to become Queen Elizabeth II, and referred to Kensington Palace as “a sort of base where I kept my things”

With the majority of its paintings in storage and the fine furniture covered in dust sheets, Kensington Palace was a sad and lost place during the Second World War. In October 1940 the palace was hit by incendiary bombs and later by flying bombs. Apartment 34 became the HQ of Personnel Section and as a result the garden was overrun with anti-aircraft guns, sandbags and trenches. The bombings, the departure of Prince Philip and the death of Princesses Louise and Beatrice resulted in a period of neglect where Kensington Palace was concerned. During the 50s residents of KP included the Master of the Horse, the Duke of Beaufort, Sir Alan Lascelles (the Queens Private Secretary) and Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone (the grand old lady of Kensington as she was known). It wasn’t until the arrival of the stylish and elegant Princess Marina, the widow of Prince George, and their children in 1955 that interest in Kensington Palace was sparked again.

In the autumn of 1969 Princess Margaret and Anthony Armstrong-Jones moved into Kensington Palace and suddenly the palace was entertaining the glamorous array of artists, celebrities, politicians and exiled royals from abroad that surrounded the Snowdon’s. Their first home was Apartment 10 – the “doll’s house” as Princess Margaret nicknamed it – which proved to small and saw them move to Princess Louise’s old house, Apartment 1A Clock Court. Princess Margaret called the apartment a dark and forbidding house, redolent of aspidistras, brown varnish and Victorian stuffiness and had to spend £80,000 of government money on the renovation. The resulting Romanesque entrance hall of black and white Welsh stone, peacock-blue colour scheme, highly polished wooden doors, Fortuny fabrics, 12,000 books, family photographs, newspapers, ashtrays, messy desks and collections of seashells, blue glassware and John Piper paintings combined to create a home of scatty formality, very much a country house feel in the middle of London.

In the 70s Prince and Princess Michael of Kent moved into Apartment 10 (the smallest of the KP apartments) and the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester moved into Apartment 4 (next door to Princess Margaret). In 1975 also  begun a four year project to restore KP back to its former glory. The major problem was the welding together of Apartments 8 and 9 – which had suffered water damage, blown-apart plasterwork (by William Kent) and damage to the Georgian staircase during the Second World War – and a lack of any detailed plans. Architects worked with government photographs of the bomb damage in WWII, family photographs of the previous occupant Countess Granville (mother-in-law to the Queen Mother’s sister Rose) and a yellowing 1928 copy of Country Life which featured photographs of  KP’s interior. The result cost £900,000 and is an example of modern British craftsmanship. The restoration did not impress Frances Shand Kydd, the mother of Lady Diana Spencer, who inspected the now-joined-together Apartment 8 and 9 with Prince Charles and said: “My daughter cannot live here. It looks just like an old woman’s house”.  Charles himself had called KP a “pigeon loft”. The South African-born interior designer Dudley Poplak was hired to incorporate millions of pounds worth of marriage gifts into a modern royal home for the newly married Prince and Princess of Wales in the red-bricked palace of Kensington.

Kensington Palace will always be linked to the tragic death of Diana. That’s why the new arrivals and renovation of KP marks a new era and new image for the palace. Gallery 19 has always been interest in Kensington Palace. We stock original paintings of Kensington Palace on paper and antique indenture as well as reproductions of eighteenth and nineteenth century views of the palace and its gardens. Our bookshelves stock both new and out-of-print books about KP and we have a selection of hand-made cards featuring atmospheric photographs of the palace in sunlight, snow and mist.

NOTE: The historical facts in this piece come from Edward Impey’s Kensington Palace: The Official Illustrated History, Andrew Morton’s Inside Kensington Palace, Carolyn Starren’s The Kensington Book and Julian Humphry’s The Private Life of Palaces. The extract from Queen Victoria’s journal is from Humphrey’s; all other quotes are found in Morton. All these titles are available from Gallery 19.

Every Spring The Friends of Holland Park hold an art exhibition in The Orangery of Holland Park. The art exhibition is a much-loved institution where Friends who are artists and artists who become Friends exhibit their paintings, works on paper, ceramics, glassware and sculptures for sale to the public. 

This year marks the 30th anniversary of The Friends of Holland Park Art Exhibition and to mark the occasion a Young Painter's Competition is running in conjunction with the main exhibition. Young Painter's in the Royal Borough have been invited to submit one A4 work in any medium, the subject Holland Park. Twelve prize winners will be selected by a judging panel, framed by Gallery 19 and hung on a separate panel in The Orangery with art supplies for the winners being donated by Cass Art.

There are two Private Views on Saturday 24 March 10.30am -12.30pm and Monday 26 March 7.30pm-9.30pm [entry by ticket]. The exhibition is open to the public Saturday 1pm – 6pm and all week from Sunday 25 March until Sunday 1 April, 10.30am-6.30pm. Admission Free.

It is estimated that one billion Valentine’s are sent every year on February 14th yet Valentine’s Day is one of the more mysterious celebrations that survive in the calendar. It emerges in the early Christian era in a few different guises. One was the “Christianization” of Lupercalia, the pagan festival of fertility which fell on February 15th and, among other traditions, involved a ‘love-lottery’ and the slapping of young bottom’s with strips of blood-soaked goats hide. Another guise was through the legends of St Valentine. Their are fourteen recorded Saint Valentines, all of them Roman martyrs. My favourite version is of Valentine, a third century priest, who secretly married young lovers in defiance of Emperor Claudius II's ban of marriage. Another possible source for Valentine’s Day was the English and French belief that the mating season (of birds) began on February 14th. The list goes on but whatever the origins of Valentines Day, the figure is romantic and the nature is sexual. It is not surprising that St Valentine was one of the most popular saint in the Middle Ages. 

While Valentine's Day sentiments survive from the fifteenth century, Valentine's Day cards became popular in the seventeenth century with  "printed" cards replacing the hand-made cards at the beginning of the machine age. In the 1840s the first mass-produced Valentine cards were sold in America by Esther A Howland. A card, purporting to be the oldest surving Valentine, belongs to the British Museum.

Gallery 19 stocks a small selection of hand-made Valentines Day cards. They comprise of 6" x 4" photographs by Alessia that have been hand-made into cards. The images are of grafitti lovers, chalk hearts, and padlocked bridges – the type of love you see  in the city today.  Happy Valentines Day!  

GALLERY 19 WILL RE-OPEN ON 16 JANUARY 2012

HAPPY NEW YEAR

While we at Gallery 19 resent being told it's Christmas in October there is one Christmas item that is always in our windows before December. Christmas cards need to be selected, written and posted before the goose is ordered, the decorations are dusted off and the mad dash to Oxford Street for presents so that is why we make our Christmas card available in November.

Following the success of our Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens Christmas card [see above] Gallery 19 has added two more cards to its collection - Kensington Palace framed by a beautiful winter tree and Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens covered in snow. Both images are by Alessia and are available exclusively from Gallery 19.

It began, innocently enough, with a miniature model of a grand staircase bought over the internet by the director of Gallery 19. This staircase was placed in the window and sold immediately. The staircase arrived from New York yet the Dutcxh company who manufactured the model seemed to have an office in the UK. Enquires were made and a catalogue ordered through which we gained access to the wonderful world of architectural models.

Architects over the centuries have made models to check details in 3D and help clients understand dimensional perspectives just as set designers built models to realize – in miniature – how a particular stage production was going to look. Architectural models are an obvious extension to an architectural art gallery like Gallery 19 and we are now proud to stock a selection of staircase models - Grand, Spiral, Lighthouse and Mission - as well as handmade reproduction models after Renaissance originals such as the antique Bell Tower, a Dome and a Demi-Dome. All models are handmade and contain handcarved details. The cherry and birch woods are stained shades of light and dark honey and have a French distressed finish. These models make spectacular conversation pieces but can also be placed in quirky corners making a feature out of dead-space.   

Gallery 19 also stocks a selection of authentic reproduction globes to compliment its growing map collection. Centuries ago globes were made by gluing copperplate printed gores on a plaster finished papier-mâché core. The complicated gravure printing process has been replicated resulting in the sharpest lines, words and symbols even on the smallest size globe. All globes are made using original charts, reserched for their historical accuracy and visual appeal as well as highlighting some of the world's most famous cartographers: Mercator, Hondius and Vaugondy.

Another new addition to the gallery is the selection of classic obelisks from the Grand Tour era. Gallery 19 used to source beautiful marbelized obelisks from Florence but when our supplier disappeared the gallery decided to keep the few remaining obelisks it had – always on display, never for sale. Gallery 19 is overjoyed to have found these hand-turned wooden obelisks which we can display and sell.

It was a serendipitous chain of events which resulted in the newest additions to the Gallery 19 collection. As with anything that was meant to be, the models are what was always missing from the gallery but, already, it's as if they've always been here. Hope you love them as much as we do. See you soon.

The sixth oldest square in the capital and the first to be built outside the city centre, Kensington Square was the vision of Thomas Young, a wood carver and joiner of St Martin-in-the-Fields who, in 1682, bought fourteen acres of land in ‘ye parish of Kensyngtoun’. Originally called King’s Square, in honour of James II, Young’s plan was to develop a spare of fashionable houses in an area unrecognized by high society. This fact did not deter Young [or the builders Young leased and sold the majority of the sites to] and house-building began in 1685.   

By 1690 the north, east and south sides were largely complete. The south side did not then include No.’s 11 and 12 which lay just outside the square’s perimeter and were added in 1700. The north side lacked No.’s 36 and 37 while one the west side only No. 24 had been completed. [The west side progressed slowly; the last houses to be built – No.’s 34 and 35 – were not erected until 1736-7].  The garden plot is depicted – bordered by trees – in the earliest known plan of the square which is dated 1717. Stables were located on the east side of the square, through the archway next to No.’s 2 and 3, in what is now called Kensington Square Mews. The stables survived until the early 1870s; the southern end of Kensington Court now occupies this site. The Greyhound at No. 1 Kensington Square has been a public house since 1686, although the building was totally rebuilt in 1899. William Makepeace Thackeray, who lived at No. 16 Young Street, made good use of the Greyhound’s colourful clientele in his novel, The History of Henry Esmond [1852].

At least one house on Kensington Square was occupied in 1687 but by 1690 there were still only a dozen inhabitants, leaving thirty or so houses empty. It was the arrival of the King and his Court to Kensington Palace in 1689 that reversed the fate of the square and made it one of the most fashionable addresses in England. This came too late for Thomas Young who was ruined financially and imprisoned for debt. The square was abandoned once more when the aristocracy decamped after George III and Kensington Square remained relatively unoccupied until 1803. This gentle decline resulted in a lack of commercial development which has enabled Kensington Square to retain its eighteenth-century character and charm. 

Gallery 19 always displays a limited edition print depicting the four sides of Kensington Square in its window and the artist, Gordon French, is currently developing a new print that superimposes the four sides of the square over an old map of Kensington. Gallery 19 also stocks a charming card of Kensington Square by Matthew Wright as well as a fascinating out-of-print book titled, Records of Kensington Square by Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede, who lived at 17 Kensington Square from 1918 until his death in 1946. 

One of the major contributors to the Gallery 19 look is our relationship with Italy. More than just a merchant of beautiful images and objects, Italy teaches and Italy inspires. In our experience, you cannot beat either the design or quality of something Made in Italy.

Gallery 19 has suppliers in Rome, Florence and Venice who we meet with on a regular basis and we are always on the look out for something exceptional to introduce into the Gallery 19 collection. Two years ago it was the calf-leather journals made in Florence and last year it was the hand-coloured reproduction engravings on antique paper which we found in Bologna and traced back to the workshop of two brothers in Oltrarno, the other side of Florence. This year – during a week in the Val d'Orcia researching a book the gallery is producing on a small chapel that sits on a hill between San Quirico d'Orcia and Pienza - we found something very special.

The discovery was a clump of cypress trees made out of wrought iron and welded onto a base made of mattaione, the local clay formed out of sediments of the Pliocene sea which covered the Crete Senesi between 2.5 and 4.5 million years ago. There was something exceptional about these cypress trees. The subject was nature yet the object was man-made and while the composition was age-old, something about the metal made it unusual and ultra-contemporary; a modern twist on art imitating nature. We were told this wrought-iron work was produced by a family of blacksmiths and were directed to their workshop in an industrial zone of the valley full of pecorino farms and terracotta factories.

The Biagiotti brothers are third generation blacksmiths. Grandfather Alfredo started the business at the beginning of the twentieth century and now his grandchildren work along side their father and young nephew forging both their original creations and perfect reproductions of period pieces from the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The Biagiotti's works are fully realized by hand in the traditional way – using fire and hammer – while all their hand-drawn designs and specifications are recorded in an old diary from 1991.

The term "blacksmith" comes from the action of 'smiting' [or hitting] the 'black' metal, either iron or its derivative steel. The black comes from fire scale, a layer of oxides that form on the surface of the metal during the heating process. After black the metal glows red, orange, yellow and white; then it melts. Colour is an important indicator of the metals workability; the ideal heat for most forging is the bright yellow-orange colour which is also referred to as "forging heat". When the metal is the right temperature it can be forged, welded, heat treated and finished.

Gallery 19 is very proud to introduce this traditional Tuscan craft to its collection. We have started with the cypress trees we first fell in love with - available as a clump or individually in three different sizes – but hope to introduce more wrought-iron pieces in the near future. We have also imported some exceptional hand-painted earthenware and hand-gilded reproduction coat-of-arms sourced from the shop we originally saw the cypress trees in. We hope you enjoy this little piece of Tuscany at Gallery 19. 

Have a great summer!